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Pamukkale University The Institute of Social Sciences

Doctoral Thesis

The Department of English Language and Literature English Language and Literature

PhD Programme

Hamdi Ali SERDAR

Supervisor

Prof. Dr. Mehmet Ali ÇELİKEL

February 2019 DENİZLİ

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to express my heartfelt feelings of gratitude and thanks to my supervisor Prof. Dr. Mehmet Ali ÇELİKEL under whose direction the idea of writing a doctoral thesis has grown and expanded itself into the pages ahead. I am also grateful to Associate Prof. Dr. Meryem AYAN, Associate Prof. Dr. Şeyda SİVRİOĞLU, Associate Prof. Dr. Cumhur Yılmaz MADRAN and Associate Prof. Dr. Ertan KUŞÇU for their invaluable encouragement with which I have felt able enough to tackle the potential difficulties involved in bringing a project of this kind to a safe conclusion. I also feel heavily indebted to both Prof. Dr. Arda ARIKAN and Assistant Prof. Sezer Sabriye İKİZ for their constructive criticism and supportive recommendations on the making of some important corrections to improve the project at hand.

I spare my special thanks to my wife, Fulya, who has been my greatest supporter during the composition of this study and who has shown relentless patience with me, without expressing a single complaint. And my final thanks go to my kid, Yusuf, who has been the greatest source of motivation without which I would never have been able to carry on.

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ABSTRACT

THE ONTOLOGY OF AUTHENTICITY IN JOHN FOWLES’S

NOVELS

Serdar, Hamdi Ali Doctoral Thesis

The Department of English Language and Literature The Doctoral Programme in English Language and Literature

Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Mehmet Ali ÇELİKEL February 2019, vii + 127 Pages

This study is concerned with the ontological analysis of the authenticity of existence in the works of John Fowles. The concept of authenticity in the ontological-existential sense has its most suggestive reverberations in the selected three novels of Fowles—The Magus, The French Lieutenant’s Woman, and A Maggot. These novels portray individual characters, all male, being stranded upon the edges of their existential awakening, with the equal chances of attaining or failing to attain a substantial degree of autonomy at the cost of losing their various possessions. In contrast to the common scholarly tendency to apply the existentialist philosophy of Sartre in making statements about the degrees of authenticity of the characters in Fowles’s fiction, this study instead proposes that the authenticity should be investigated as an ontological issue—an issue of being, just as Heidegger did when he wrote his seminal work Being and Time. Thus, this study aims to explain ontologically how and why Nicholas in The Magus remains in a state of uncertainty about his future chances of choosing his own self over a multiplicity of selves fictionally created in the godgames of Conchis; how and why Charles in The French Lieutenant’s Woman moves much closer than Nicholas to the possibility of substituting his Victorian self with the upcoming twentieth-century existentialist self; and finally, how and why Ayscough in A Maggot fails to see the authenticity of Lee’s self and the genuineness of her own interpretation of the circumstances about the mysterious discovery of a dead body and the untraceable loss of somebody else.

Key Words: John Fowles, Martin Heidegger, authenticity, existentialism,

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ÖZET

JOHN FOWLES’UN ROMANLARINDA KENDİNE ÖZGÜLÜĞÜN

ONTOLOJİSİ

Serdar, Hamdi Ali Doktora Tezi

İngiliz Dili ve Edebiyatı Ana Bilim Dalı İngiliz Dili ve Edebiyatı Doktora Programı Tez Danışmanı: Prof. Dr. Mehmet Ali ÇELİKEL

Şubat 2019, vii + 127 sayfa

Bu çalışma, John Fowles’un eserlerinde varoluşun kendine özgülüğüne dair ontolojik açıdan yapılan incelemeyi konu edinmektedir. Ontolojik anlamıyla kendine özgülük kavramı Fowles’un seçilen şu üç romanında en belirgin yansımalarını barındırmaktadır—Büyücü, Fransız Teğmenin Kadını, ve Yaratık. Bu romanlar tümü erkek olan bireysel karakterleri varoluşsal uyanışlarının kıyısında adeta sahile vurmuş bir halde resmetmektedir. Bu karakterlere sahip oldukları çeşitli şeyleri kaybetme pahasına önemli bir oranda otonomi kazanmayı başarabilme ya da başaramama hususlarında eşit şanslar tanınmıştır. Fowles’un kurgu eserlerinde karakterlerin kendine özgü olma dereceleri ile ilgili yargılarda bulunurken Sartre’ın varoluşçu felsefesini kullanan ve genel-geçerlik kazanan akademik eğilimin aksine, bu çalışma, en önemli eserlerinin başında gelen Varlık ve Zaman’ı yazarken Heidegger’in de yaptığı gibi, kendine özgülüğün ontolojik bir mesele olarak incelenmesi gerektiğini önermektedir. Bundan dolayı, bu çalışma ontolojik açıdan şunları incelemeyi hedeflemektedir: nasıl ve neden Büyücü’de Nicholas, Conchis’in oyunlarında kurgusal olarak yaratılmış olan benliklerden ziyade kendi benliğini seçme noktasında gelecekte yapacağı seçimle ilgili bir belirsizlik durumunda kalmaktadır; yine benzer bir şekilde, nasıl ve neden Nicholas’la kıyaslandığında, Fransız Teğmenin Kadını’nda, Viktoryen benliğini içinde bulunduğu zamana göre henüz gelmekte olan yirminci yüzyılın varoluşçu benliğiyle değiştirme hususunda yapacağı seçime Charles daha yakın durmaktadır; ve son olarak yine aynı şekilde, nasıl ve neden Yaratık’ta Ayscough, Lee’nin kendine özgülüğünü ve dahası, ölü bir cesedin gizemli bir şekilde bulunmasının ve bir başkasının da izi sürülemeyecek şekilde ortadan kaybolmasının ardındaki olayları yorumlayışında kendini belli eden özgünlüğünü görememektedir.

Anahtar Kelimeler: John Fowles, Martin Heidegger, kendine özgülük,

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

PLAGIARISM .……... DEDICATION... i ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS... ... iii ABSTRACT…... iv ÖZET………... v TABLE OF CONTENTS... vi INTRODUCTION... 1

CHAPTER ONE

THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK: EXISTENTIALISM AND

HEIDEGGER’S ONTOLOGY

1.1. Existentialism and Major Existentialist Philosophers... 10

1.2. Martin Heidegger and His Existential Ontology... 18

1.2.l. Division One: Dasein’s Spatiality as Being-in-the-world... 22

1.2.2. Division Two: Dasein’s Temporality... 30

CHAPTER TWO

THE MAGUS: THE AUTHENTICITY OF

BEING-IN-THE-WORLD

2.1. An Overview of The Magus ... 43

2.2. The Magus and The Question of Ontological In/Authenticity... 52

2.2.l. Being-in-the-World and Being-in-the-Fiction... 53

2.2.2. Thrownness and Falling ... 59

2.2.3. Understanding ... 60

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CHAPTER THREE

THE FRENCH LIEUTENANT’S WOMAN: THE

AUTHENTICITY OF ANXIETY

3.1. An Overview of The French Lieutenant’s Woman... 64

3.2. The French Lieutenant’s Woman and Its Predecessors... 67

3.3. The Implications of the Relation between Sarah and Charles... 73

3.4. The Ontological Implications of Anxiety... 76

3.4.1. Charles’s Discovery of Sarah ... 78

3.4.2. Sarah’s Ontological Ambiguity... 83

3.4.3. Charles’s Existential Evolution... 86

CHAPTER FOUR

A MAGGOT: THE AUTHENTICITY OF INTERPRETATION

4.1. An Overview of A Maggot ... 91

4.2. Three Figures: Mr Bartholomew, H. Ayscough, and Rebecca H. Lee... 97

4.2.1. Mr Bartholomew as the Enigmatic Figure... 97

4.2.2. Henry Ayscough as the Detective Figure... 99

4.2.3. Rebecca Hocknell Lee as the Evolving Figure... 103

4.3. The Inauthenticity of Ayscough’s Interpretation... 104

CONCLUSION... 111

REFERENCES... 120

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INTRODUCTION

Written over a period of almost a quarter of a century in the second half of the twentieth century, the fiction of John Fowles as a whole seems to have its locus hidden in his placement of the focus on the gaining of “whole sight” as the prerequisite to avoid “desolation” in every sense of the word (Fowles, 2004a: 7). The absence of access to light and its consequent misery appear to form the backbone of his works of fiction in which a variety of characters are repeatedly depicted as figures coming from nowhere and thrown in a state of persistent ambiguity. More significantly, this has long been the benchmark for a vast array of critical readings of his fiction. This study similarly aims to insert itself in this group of critical readings, albeit with a newer focus placed upon the examination of a selection of Fowles’s fiction in the light of German philosopher Martin Heidegger’s views concerning the ontological clues of authenticity. The overall objective of this study is to consult Heidegger about the assessment of the prospects of major characters gaining the whole sight—or, to use an alternative expression, their prospects of achieving the authenticity of existence—in the selected novels of Fowles.

An essayist, a translator, a poet, and a short-story writer, the true fame of John Fowles (1926 – 2005) lies in the scholarly acknowledgement of him as one of the leading contemporary British novelists. He was born in Leigh-on-Sea, Essex. Following his military service as a lieutenant in the Royal Marines from 1945 to 1947, he began to study French at Oxford University. After earning his Bachelor’s degree, he taught English first in France, then in Greece and finally in England. While he was in Greece,

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he met his first wife, Elizabeth, who died of cancer in 1990. Upon their return to England, they lived for a short term in London. He lived in Lyme Regis, Dorset, for the rest of his life after he had moved there from London in 1966.

His career as a full-time novelist began with the publication of The Collector in 1963, and it extended as far as to the mid-1980s. Within a timespan of almost a quarter of the century, Fowles wrote six novels and one collection of stories. The publication of The Collector in 1963 was followed by the publication of the first edition of The Magus in 1965. When The French Lieutenant’s Woman was published in 1969, Fowles won the Silver Pen Award and subsequently the W. H. Smith and Son Literary award in 1970. His collection of stories, The Ebony Tower, was published in 1974. Three years later, in 1977, both Daniel Martin came out and The Magus was re-published in its revised edition. In the next few years, Fowles wrote and published two more novels: Mantissa and A Maggot. Although his career as a novelist was continued with the publication of Mantissa in 1982, he had had to end it with the publication of his final novel, A Maggot, in 1985, because of a stroke he suffered in 1988. The publications of the three of his novels—The Collector, The Magus, and The French Lieutenant’s Woman—were followed by their adaptations for cinema. The screen adaptation of The Collector was released in 1965, The Magus in 1968, and The French Lieutenant’s Woman in 1981.

After the stroke, he could publish only works of non-fiction. The stroke left him without sufficient imaginative power to continue writing more fiction. His later attempts to keep writing fiction were all left either unfinished or unfulfilled. He could come up with only one more work of non-fiction just a decade later in 1988. The Aristos marks Fowles’s first work of non-fiction which was published first in 1964 and subsequently in 1968 in a revised edition. It was followed by The Tree which came out in 1979. The appearance of The Wormholes – Essays and Occasional Writings in 1998 was continued with the subsequent publications of his journals in two volumes. While the first volume of The Journals was published only two years before he died in 2005, the second volume was published posthumously in 2006.

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The Collector tells the story of an abduction in which Miranda, an art student, falls victim to the obsession of Frederick, an uneducated collector of butterflies, who neurotically believes that he can randomly pick a girl and force her to love him. His obsession, however, leads to the death of the girl in the end. In The Collector, Fowles presents the series of events leading to the death of the girl from both angles, leaving the reader free to choose which version to trust. While the intricate mixture of reality and illusion in The Magus, a game-oriented novel which consists of a series of ordeals, brings the narrative to an unsettled conclusion, the narrative is similarly brought to a multiple ending in The French Lieutenant’s Woman as well, in which the portrayal of the Victorian romance between two lovers combines with an elegant form of postmodern narration. The French Lieutenant’s Woman enables Fowles to compare most effectively “past and present in order to understand one by the other” (Brantlinger, Adam, & Rothblatt, 1972: 348). Initially planned to bear ‘Variations’ as its title, The Ebony Tower contains a collection of stories, one of which is Fowles’s own translation of a medieval French story, titled “Eliduc”. Fowles wrote Daniel Martin as a semiautobiographical novel while he was in his forties. The novel is about a man in his forties who wishes to write his autobiographical story. Daniel Martin is commonly considered as the only novel which Fowles concluded with a relatively happier ending, shifting much more manifestly than ever his focus away from existentialism to humanism. In Daniel Martin, Fowles uses a serpentine narrative technique, not only shifting the points of view but also going back and forward continuously in the narrative time. An Oxford graduate, Daniel is an English man living in the United States and pursuing a film career in Hollywood. The novel casts him as someone stuck in between—unable to constitute himself as either an English man or an American. Mantissa hosts a fictional representation of what takes place in the mind of Miles Green who finds himself taken mysteriously to a hospital, without the slightest idea of how he got there, who he is, and who his wife and children are. In Mantissa, Dr. Delfie, the fictional creation of the mind of Miles Green, is seen to assume subjectivity in her arguments with and reactions against her creator in a long discussion of theirs about writing and literature, among many other things. Fowles goes back to the early 18th century in A Maggot, a novel that begins with a mental image of five travellers riding through the countryside for a secretive purpose. The narrative is broken off with the news of the discovery of a hanging corpse with violets stuffed in its mouth—the corpse of Dick Thurlow—and the disappearance of his master, Mr Bartholomew. The ensuing

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launch of a series of exhaustive ‘examinations and depositions’ of several characters falls short of reaching a satisfying conclusion, since they all leave the investigator, Henry Ayscough, helpless in the labyrinth of interpretation.

Taken as a whole, Fowles’ fiction is generally considered to be among the finest examples of postmodern British literature, and has in time won him fame as a novelist whose fiction resembles “a huge protean amusement park” where “illusion becomes reality rather than vice versa” (Palmer, 1974: 1-2). Considered technically, his fiction qualifies as postmodern because it evinces the postmodern mixture of self-reflexivity, intertextuality, and historiography. The historiographic aspect of Fowles’s novels such as The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Daniel Martin and A Maggot tends to manifest itself as “the interpenetrating or telescoping of past and present” (Cooper, 1991: 105). The way in which Fowles handles the past in his novels generally is regarded as the reflection of a “desire to colonize the past as a playground of authorial narcissism” (139). What is more, many of his novels attest to his metafictional manipulation of the working mechanism of fiction through his occasional narratorial entries into his own narrative—something intended both to provide his own commentaries on the action, the characters and the plot on the one hand, and to compare his own world to the worlds of his fiction on the other. Palmer (1974) comments upon the metafictional dimension of Fowles’s fiction in terms in which he describes Fowles as “a novelist writing into a mirror so that each of his works reflects back upon his own mind and vision” (3). It is particularly The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Daniel Martin, Mantissa and A Maggot where the self-reflexive tendency of the postmodern fiction “to exhibit its textuality, to signal and display its fictional nature” becomes all the more apparent (104). Thematically speaking, however, the description of Fowles as a novelist of ideas finds its possibly best confirmation in the intellectual familiarity that he had developed as a student at Oxford in the 1940s and the 1950s with both the French existentialism and the French literature. Therefore, Fowles’s fiction as a whole emerges as “an embodiment of freedom, of individuality, and of existentialism” (Salami, 1992: 13). As Fowles himself pointed out in one of his interviews, the abovementioned familiarity afterwards led him to take on the profession of writing fiction with a major view towards examining the chances of his characters attaining existential freedom and authenticity in various fictional environments which are remote either in time from the moment of writing, as in his quasi-historical novels The French Lieutenant’s Woman

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and A Maggot, or distant in place from the location of writing, as in his autobiographical novels The Magus and Daniel Martin:

I’m interested in the side of existentialism which deals with freedom: the business of whether we do have freedom, whether we do have free will, to what extent you can change your life, choose yourself, and all the rest of it. Most of my characters have been involved in this Sartrian concept of authenticity and inauthenticity. (Campbell and Fowles, 1976: 466)

The evolution of Nicholas in The Magus as the possessor of “selfish passions” into Rebecca Lee in A Maggot as the embodiment of “other-directed compassion” emerges as the thread which appears to most effectively bind all his fiction together in a manner in which Fowles “tells and retells the story of what it means to be human and live authentically in a postmodern world” (Vipond, 1999: xiii). His fiction can be taken as the written expression of his “obsession” with the relentless exploration of not only newer ways of writing but also with the extent of freedom in human life, the role of hazard, or chance, as a causative force in human existence, the possibility of grasping the opportunity to grow to an existential maturity, the existential quest for self-knowledge and self-discovery, and the confusion of the line between fiction and reality (Fowles, 1970: 41).

Of all his fiction, the three novels in particular—The Magus, The French Lieutenant’s Woman, and A Maggot—appear to exemplify his abovementioned obsession with maximum accuracy. To begin with, the original impetus for these three novels has always been an image. In fact, Fowles described himself in his interview with Baker (1989) as a writer grossly attracted by the “image-constituted kernels of a story” (15). The kernel of the story has become an image of a villa in The Magus, an image of a woman in The French Lieutenant’s Woman, and an image of travellers on horseback in A Maggot. Moreover, these novels can be regarded as an amalgamation of various structural forms functioning all at the same time. As Hutcheon (1978) suggests, The French Lieutenant’s Woman emerges as the novel which beautifully embodies “the combined use of allegory, parody, self-mirroring structures, and overt commentary” (81). In a similar manner, she continues to suggest that The Magus effectively appropriates the use of various forms, including “the Bildungsroman, the gothic tale, the

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masque, psychodrama and fantasy” (84). Moreover, one of the main concerns of Fowles’s fiction is to depict certain characters in a state of failure to solve puzzles— whether built naturally as in A Maggot or built artificially as in The Magus or embodied in the personification of a character, namely Sarah Woodruff, as in The French Lieutenant’s Woman—whereas they relentlessly delude themselves that they will eventually grow abler to make it through. One other point commonly shared by these three novels is related to the absence of a home and a family of the main characters. The characters directly influenced by this kind of separation from home and family include Nicholas Urfe in The Magus, Sarah Woodruff in The French Lieutenant’s Woman, and Rebecca Hocknell and Mr Bartholomew in A Maggot. The impact of the absence of homes and families on the main characters is further strengthened by Fowles’s choice of specific settings which may be foreign as in The Magus, or a remote small village as in A Maggot, or a countryside on the coastal town of Lyme Regis as in The French Lieutenant’s Woman. It is especially The Magus which hosts a fictional world where the reality is deliberately subordinated to the fiction. As the story unfolds, Nicholas Urfe grows aware of the need to understand the working mechanism of the fictional world which he cannot evade in any way. In each case, the main characters are introduced into the narratives as uprooted figures, finding themselves in places far away from their homes, either spatially or temporally. As Palmer (1974) suggests, the introduction of the central characters as uprooted figures into the narratives often takes place “suddenly” and “irrationally” (79). Besides, Fowles’s fiction is commonly acknowledged as the fiction of growth and maturity in the existential terms. In fact, the possibility of the existential growth of the characters forms the thematic core of Fowles’s fiction. In Palmer’s (1974) words, the thematic scheme of Fowles’s fiction “dramatizes the struggles of individuals to define themselves and to make moral decisions about the conduct of their lives in worlds which discourage self-expression and deny existential freedom” (78). Palmer also suggests that the existential growth implies “the loneliness of selfhood” which the central characters of Fowles’s fiction experience in one way or another (79). Moreover, it should be noted that the existential growth often emerges as a response to a female call. In her analysis of the fiction of John Fowles, Onega (1996) refers to it as “the single archetypal topos of the hero’s quest for maturation,” frequently propagated by a female temptation (40). In each of the three novels, women come to the fore as “the stimulus of mystery” (Sweeney, 1983: 107). These three novels attest to a female impulse which pushes or tempts a male figure to a state of maturity, followed by

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an initial state of bewilderment which arises from being exposed to a series of mysterious events or from being introduced to an enigmatic figure. The major male characters in these novels, namely Nicholas Urfe in The Magus, Charles Smithson in The French Lieutenant’s Woman and Henry Ayscough in A Maggot, are somehow brought face to face with an enigmatic figure or with a mysterious event which they erroneously believe that they can solve. The authorial decision to construct the narrative around a mystery or an enigmatic figure in each novel appears to stem from his belief that “unknowing, or hazard, is as vital to man as water” (Fowles, 1993: 27). These common characteristics of Fowles’s selected three novels can accurately manifest that they are fundamentally interwoven with existential themes.

The proposition that “the postmodern imagination … is an existential imagination” can perhaps find its best verification in John Fowles’s fiction (Spanos, 1972: 148). Fowles (1993) attaches particular significance to existentialism, because existentialism—as Fowles has tended to understand it—is an issue of individuation in the exact sense of the word. For him, the real locus of existentialism lies in “the revolt of the individual against all those systems of thought, theories of psychology, and social and political pressures that attempt to rob him of his individuality”. The relation of existentialism to his selected three novels may perhaps be better illustrated in his description of the function of existentialism as an attempt “to re-establish in the individual a sense of his own uniqueness,” as in the personalities of Rebecca Hocknell Lee in A Maggot and Sarah Woodruff in The French Lieutenant’s Woman; “a knowledge of the value of anxiety as an antidote to intellectual complacency (petrification),” as in the personalities of both Charles Smithson in The French Lieutenant’s Woman and Henry Ayscough in A Maggot; and “a realization of the need he has to learn to choose and control his own life,” as in the personalities of Nicholas Urfe in The Magus and Charles Smithson in The French Lieutenant’s Woman (122).

Much of the scholarly criticism has addressed and still continues to address the abovementioned themes in the fiction of Fowles from the perspective of French existentialism solely, particularly through the existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre. In a similar manner, this study also aims to contribute to the available criticism of Fowles and his fiction by analysing his selected three novels from the general perspective of

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existentialism. The specific matter of subject is one and the same in each analysis of the three novels: the existential modes of authenticity vs. inauthenticity. ‘Which characters in each of these three novels can be regarded as authentic in existentialist terms and which cannot?’ and ‘what makes certain characters emerge as existentially authentic and others inauthentic?’ are the few questions, among many others, which will be focused upon in each analysis. The need for this study, however, has arisen from (a) the realization that authenticity and inauthenticity form the two of the major concepts of existentialism which Martin Heidegger discussed in his Being and Time (1927) years before Sartre did it in his Being and Nothingness (1943); (b) the absence of any scholarly work which discusses these two concepts in the fiction of Fowles from the Heideggerian perspective; (c) the suggestion shared by the scholars like Warnock (1970), Palmer (1976) and Spanos (1976) that it is the existentialism of Heidegger, rather than that of Sartre, which best connects itself to the postmodernist writing through its later adaptation by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida for his development of the theory of deconstruction in the late 1960s—something which can be pinpointed in the fact that Heidegger’s ontological treatise in Being and Time starts with the avowed aim of destructing the traditional western metaphysics in the first place.

It is without a doubt that Fowles’s fiction accurately attests to his postmodernity. Heidegger has also been classified as a philosopher with a postmodern orientation. According to people like Palmer (1976), the postmodernity of Heidegger can be demonstrated in his introduction of “a new interpretive self-awareness” when an analytical interaction with a literary text is underway (413). In tandem with the argued novelty of the postmodern interpretive self-awareness of the Heideggerian ontology, the genuineness of this study lies in its interpretive approach: the present study suggests that the question of existential authenticity vs. inauthenticity in Fowles’s fiction can be handled from a distinct viewpoint, which is based upon the ontological interpretation of human existence in its authentic and inauthentic modes which Martin Heidegger has investigated and presented at length in his Being and Time.

Aside from the Introduction and the Conclusion, the present study has been structured into four body chapters. The chapter on the theoretical framework of this study, Chapter One, covers in its first part an overview of the historical development of

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existentialism as a philosophical movement, and the contributions of major existentialist philosophers to it; in its second part, it moves on to express the basic assumptions of Martin Heidegger in his Being and Time about the ontology of human existence in its authentic and inauthentic possibilities. Each of the next three chapters has been devoted to one of the three novels of Fowles listed in the chronological order of publication. The chapter on The Magus, Chapter Two, discusses the relation of the novel to the existential possibilities of authenticity and inauthenticity in its first part, while the second part investigates The Magus from the ontological perspectives of Being-in-the-world, thrownness, falling, and understanding. The existential evolution of Charles into someone with an authentic sense of the self is brought under the spotlight in the chapter on The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Chapter Three, in relation to the ontological concept of anxiety. The discussion in the chapter on A Maggot, Chapter Four, is closely linked to the ontological concepts of interpretation and understanding, and is centred around the inability of Henry Ayscough to develop a genuine sense of direction to go out of the maze which he finds himself drifted to by the puzzlement of depositions. The Conclusion covers the final evaluative thoughts about the congruence between the planned outcome of the study and the actual one it has.

These introductory notes on Fowles, his fiction, and his philosophical attachment to existentialism are continued in more detail in the next chapter with further notes on existentialism as a philosophical movement in general, and on its combination with the phenomenology and ontology of Heidegger in particular.

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CHAPTER ONE

THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK: EXISTENTIALISM AND

HEIDEGGER’S ONTOLOGY

The purpose of this chapter is to supply a theoretical framework within which the whole remainder of this study will be contextualized. Since this study has been oriented towards the exploration of Fowles’s fiction as well as towards the search for ontological clues about the existential circumstances in which the authenticities of the characters are shaped, it appears necessary that existentialism should be introduced as a philosophical movement in the first place, followed by the introduction of Heidegger’s ontological outlook on the conditions of existential authenticity in the second place.

1.1. Existentialism and Major Existentialist Philosophers

Existentialism provides the general framework within which the present study questions the two modes of authenticity and inauthenticity and seeks for answers to them. To begin with its definition, it can be broadly defined as the philosophy of existence—a philosophical movement which emerged in Germany in the mid-nineteenth century (Tillich, 1944: 44). It is especially the years of turmoil in the first half of the twentieth century that raised it to the level of a highly philosophical movement which became the voice of millions across Europe in general for their

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demand to get free. It is, however, particularly France where existentialism reached its zenith with the publication of Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness in 1943. Among the best-known representatives of existentialism can be cited Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Jean-Paul Sartre. As Tillich points out, the discussion of the relationship between essence and existence forms the starting point of the existential philosophy (44). Aside from the relationship between essence and existence, it also covers the discussions of the following notions: possibility and actuality, estrangement, time and temporality, death, finitude, subjectivity and objectivity, truth and reality, loneliness, etc. From Kierkegaard onwards all the way down to Sartre, existentialists commonly proposed that human existence is essentially distinct from the existence of objects or animals. The distinction lies in the human capacity for choosing—or, to put it more specifically, in the human freedom to choose. In fact, the existentialist emphasis on the human freedom came as a response both to “the ‘rational’ system of thought and life developed by Western industrial society and its philosophic representatives” and to the resultant destruction of “individual freedom, personal decision and organic community” in the end (Tillich, 66).

In her Existentialism, Mary Warnock (1970) charts the development of existentialism from its birth to its present state. She traces the historical rise of existentialism as far back as Kant, whose ethical theory foregrounds man as “the possessor of a will” (3). Warnock’s overall analysis of the major existentialist philosophers reveals that all of them have jointly erased the Cartesian distinction between the mind / the inner and the body / the world (138). Furthermore, she adds that the existentialist methodology relies upon “a perfectly deliberate and intentional use of the concrete as a way of approaching the abstract, the particular as a way of approaching the general” (133). According to her, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, the two leading figures of existentialism, came up with their own interpretations of the human existence and its prerogative—the freedom of choice. While Kierkegaard formulated the religious version of existentialism in accordance with Christianity, Nietzsche became far more secular in his handling of existentialism. However, both philosophers agreed with Kant that the source of value of human existence lies in the acts of will (6).

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With the emergence of existentialism, terms such as individuality and subjectivity have gained enormous significance. Existentialism essentially proposes that life is largely a consequence of individual responsibility of deciding how to live. It holds that the concepts of right and wrong can change from one person to another. Therefore, the development of existentialism begins with the rise of the philosophical tendency to choose the individual over the community. In Warnock’s analysis, this tendency is termed as subjectivity, or the reliance upon individual attempts to develop a response to the domination of an external code of morality, or objectivity. Warnock’s analysis includes the definition of objectivity as “the tendency to accept rules governing both behaviour and thought” (8). Both Kierkegaard and Nietzsche are united in their attack against objectivity as “the enemy of understanding” (13). Warnock notes that for Kierkegaard, the capability of existence required the capability of “devising” one’s own way of life (134). Furthermore, both philosophers jointly argue that objectivity is an illusion. This explains the reason why the significance of the freedom of choice lies in the tendencies of both Kierkegaard and Nietzsche to bring subjectivity to the foreground, send objectivity to the background, and stress the need for inwardness in enabling man to discover the truth for himself.

The most remarkable characteristics of Kierkegaard and his existentialism can be narrowed down to his “passionate, anti-scientific, personal approach to the world” (75). Compared with Kierkegaard, Nietzsche emerges as the first philosophical voice of the call for absolute refusal to accept “the whole doctrine of the universalizability of the moral law” (19). According to Warnock, the significance of Nietzsche consists in his being the first philosopher to express far more firmly than ever been witnessed the disbelief that a purely objective description of phenomena can ever be possible. What gets passed off as the objective truth is in fact a collection of falsified beliefs. The implication of this is that existentialism calls for refusal to believe that moral laws have been designed purely for the benefits of humanity. On the contrary, the Nietzschean thought assumes that man is naturally oriented towards designing his environment in such a way that his institutionalization of moral laws and ethical values allows him to “dominate and manipulate the world” as he wishes (14). At this point, Warnock’s commentary on Nietzsche runs as follows:

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The essential truth, as he [Nietzsche] saw it, was that men choose their own values; just as in describing the world they choose those categories of descriptions which seem most useful, which enable them to manipulate the world best, so, still more manifestly, they exercise their will to power in praising and admiring those features of the world which help them to dominate and master their environment. (16)

Warnock further suggests that Existentialism can be considered as “a compound of emotional and intellectual factors” (23). According to her classification, while the thoughts of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche provide the necessary sources to identify the emotional side of existentialism, the intellectual side of it comes from Edmund Husserl and his work on phenomenology which laid the methodological foundation of existentialism. In a sense, it was Husserl who introduced the scientific dimension to existentialism. Moreover, Husserl also strictly defied the Cartesian separation of the mind from the body (69). The basic methodological components of phenomenology include the epoché, or the phenomenological reduction, the purpose of which is “to eliminate presuppositions, and to turn experience into ‘pure phenomena’” (28). The fundamental purpose of phenomenology is to develop an objective method for studying and describing what is commonly referred to as subjective phenomena: consciousness and experience. In other words, Husserl and his phenomenology were oriented towards explaining the relation between the subject ‘I’ and “his perceptual and emotional world” (68).

The influence of Husserl and his phenomenology on existentialism can hardly be grasped without an insight into the thoughts of his pupil, Martin Heidegger, and his adaptation of phenomenology. Although Heidegger is commonly regarded as a leading philosopher of the modern existentialist movement, he has never referred to himself as such. What rather connects Heidegger to those existentialist philosophers who preceded him and to those who followed him is essentially his phenomenological interpretation of the Being of beings through his ontological study of the human existence. Therefore, the phenomenology as Heidegger framed it can also be called Existentialist phenomenology.

As Warnock suggests, a profound disagreement which broke out between Heidegger and Husserl in terms of their approach to the purpose of phenomenology led to the emergence of the following differentiation between Husserl’s phenomenological

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focus on consciousness and Heidegger’s use of phenomenology as a means of access to the ontological constitution of the Being of beings (48). The focal point of the existentialism of Heidegger has been described as ontological—or, as an investigation into the meaning of Being of beings. In contrast to Heidegger, Husserl bracketed “all questions concerning existence to achieve greater certainty” in a scientific sense (Schroeder, 2006: 216). To use Werner Brock’s (1949) words, Heidegger adopted the phenomenology of Husserl “to analyse the structure of Dasein [the human existence], as it actually is, in its relations to the things in the ‘world’, non-human and human” (33). To further clarify the point at hand, Heidegger relies upon what he himself calls “hermeneutic phenomenology” as the philosophical method to carry out the investigation in question.

Warnock also suggests that Heidegger should be thought of “as the first philosophical Existentialist, that is, as the first to direct phenomenology into an Existentialist channel” (67). The reason for this is that Heidegger took Husserl’s phenomenology and extended it to cover an analysis of the significance of freedom for the possibility of an authentic mode of existence. According to her, in contrast to Husserl, Heidegger’s equation of existence with the future and the possible rather than with the present and the actual, has helped to get the human existence redefined “as a free subject, capable of doing things and initiating changes in the world” (68).

It would be wrong to treat Heidegger as a philosopher who has been an existentialist per se and has used phenomenology throughout his career. He was an existentialist, as Warnock points out, “albeit one-time and partial” (53). The line of his career shows that in the second half of his career, which started sometime in the early 1940s, his interest gradually has shifted away from phenomenology as the proper philosophical method of study of Being to the investigation into the language of poetry which he believed would eventually provide the necessary link to the understanding of Being. It is therefore important to keep in mind that for the purpose of this present study only the first part of Heidegger’s entire philosophical career will be of concern to us.

The choice of subjectivity over objectivity, understood in Kierkegaardian terms as a fundamental existentialist approach towards the interpretation of phenomena on an

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individual level, can be extended to Heidegger’s concept of jemeiningkeit. Warnock prefers to provide the English equivalent of individuality for jemeiningkeit. It basically means that with all the future possibilities it offers to me, my existence is wholly my own. In this respect, the fundamental contribution of Heidegger to existentialism can be found in his overall proposition that to exist is basically an issue of possibility on an individual level. Furthermore, he mainly suggests that existence, taken as a matter of possibility, can be either authentic or inauthentic. As will be discussed in more detail in the next pages, these two terms are of crucial importance to his existentialist philosophy. Warnock sums up her understanding of the Heideggerian notion of inauthenticity as a failure “to distinguish ourselves from the mass” (55). She furthermore provides her own definition of authenticity as “a realization of one’s position in the world, one’s isolation, and one’s inevitable orientation towards one’s own death” (60). In fact, Heidegger’s overall argument for the distinction between authentic and inauthentic modes of existence relies heavily upon his discussion of death which has the potentiality to lead to the emergence of intense feelings of dread and anxiety when it is conceived as a point in life in which the possibility of existing will no longer be available. Death is discussed in Heidegger as an instance of nothingness, which is of crucial importance to the possibility of attaining existential authenticity. Warnock introduces to her reader the Heideggerian concept of nothingness in its two senses: nothingness as “a kind of gap or separation” between the human consciousness and the world, and nothingness as the “futility” of the world and its contents (93).

It is without a doubt that Warnock’s characterization of Being and Time as one of the major existentialist works which was “aimed at exploring man’s place in the world” succinctly sums it up (69). Nevertheless, it would not be misleading to argue more specifically that Heidegger wrote his Being and Time to define the authentic mode of existence and its differentiation from the inauthentic one. Yet, it is obvious that his theory is complicated enough, and because the present study relies heavily upon the exposition of additional concepts of his existential phenomenology, which are in one way or another related with authenticity and inauthenticity, the details will be provided in the following pages, after a brief introduction to the French existentialists—first Maurice Merleau-Ponty and his phenomenology, and then Sartre and his existentialism.

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Warnock introduces Merleau-Ponty as the French philosopher who is best known for his work Phenomenology of Perception (72). Warnock defines the focal point of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophical writing as consisting in a series of efforts to understand “the relation between consciousness and the world” at all levels conceivable (73). The existentialist emphasis on the subjectivity of perception leads Merleau-Ponty to borrow Lebenswelt1 from Husserl and Dasein from Heidegger and to use them together to develop his theory on “my being in the world” in his Phenomenology of Perception (90). The annihilation of the assumption that there exists “an absolute distinction between the perceiving subject and the object perceived” is, according to Warnock, central to Phenomenology of Perception (78). In this respect, Merleau-Ponty presupposes that the understanding of man’s place in the world in existential terms requires the understanding of perception as a phenomenological fact.

Despite the visible effects of Husserl and his phenomenology on Merleau-Ponty and his thoughts, the influence of the Husserlian phenomenology on the French existentialist intellectuals begins with Sartre. The significance of Sartre as an existentialist lies in his pioneering work in introducing Husserl and his phenomenology to French philosophers (71). In this respect, the Sartrean existentialism can be termed as more Husserlian, and less Heideggerian.

Sartre put his formulation of existentialism in his seminal work Being and Nothingness. The existentialist philosophy of Sartre embarks upon the distinction between the two modes of being-in-itself and being-for-itself. The non-conscious objects, such as stones or shoes, exist in the mode of being-in-itself. Their existence as stones and shoes in the mode of being-in-itself is constant. The mode of being-for-itself is, however, an issue of freedom in the human context. Human beings cannot be thought of as being human beings in the way trees are thought of as being trees. Human beings are distinguished from other beings in terms of their freedom to choose what they wish to become. The mode of being-for-itself becomes a matter of human freedom “when it negates the in-itself and rushes into the future, as when a human subject strives towards

1 Usually translated from German as lifeworld, lebenswelt is used as a technical term in the

phenomenology of Husserl to describe “the world of human activity” in which “everyday sociability” is treated as the base of human existence (Macey, 2001: 230). It serves as the starting point of any phenomenological study of other realms of life and human consciousness (Macey, 298).

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authenticity by assuming a situation and the possibility of freedom that it affords” (Macey, 2001: 201). The existentialism of Sartre agrees with that of Heidegger that existence is closely related with the discovery of the ways for actualizing the possible, with the concept of nothingness and its resultant feeling of dread—or, anxiety, and with freedom. However, what best distinguishes Sartre from Heidegger is that Sartre defines existence as preceding essence, whereas existence is conceived as equal to the essence itself in Heidegger. According to Warnock, just as nothingness has been an essential component of the Heideggerian existentialism, it has also been crucially significant for understanding Sartre’s version of existentialism, which defines man as a Being-for-itself while objects are defined as Beings-in-themselves. Warnock further suggests that in the existentialism of Sartre, nothingness should be considered as an empty space between the consciousness of a human being and the world of unconscious beings which “he aims to fill by his own actions, his thoughts and his perceptions” (94). Warnock’s analysis of Sartre and his existentialism ends with her statement that in his later years, Sartre shifted his focus away from Existentialism to Marxism. As she points it out, Sartre viewed Marxism as the dominant philosophy of the twentieth century, while he regarded existentialism as simply “an ideology conceived within its framework” (127).

The Heideggerian concept of inauthenticity finds its counterpart in the notion of Bad Faith in the existentialism of Sartre. In the chapter on Bad Faith in Being and Nothingness, Sartre (1978) puts the utmost emphasis on the constitution of human reality in Bad Faith “as a being which is what it is not and which is not what it is” (63). He uses the same argumentation when he points to “the ontological characteristic of the world of bad faith with which the subject surrounds himself” (68). Bad faith is, in this respect, something that denotes self-deception. Bad Faith also bears a close resemblance to falsehood, argues Sartre. However, he draws a fine distinction between the two. He emphasizes that falsehood implies a state in which the truth is hidden from the others, whereas “in bad faith it is from myself that I am hiding the truth” (49). Warnock describes the Sartrean theory on Bad Faith as a consequence of the pretence that man has got limited freedom in choosing what to think of and to do in his continual endeavour to avoid the burden of “anguish” which results from his abrupt realization that nothingness is indeed central to the human existence (98). Under the entry of existentialism in The Penguin Dictionary of Critical Theory, Macey (2001) defines Bad Faith as the self-deceptive choice to refuse to choose at all. Macey’s comments on the

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Sartrean existentialism further include Sartre’s dismissal of the view that Bad Faith can be considered as something excusable (116). While Sartre refuses to offer a way out of Bad Faith, Heidegger suggests in his Being and Time that there are possible ways to achieve authenticity.

To sum up, as Warnock suggests, existentialism, despite its present decline in its appeal to the contemporary man, has essentially been a philosophical attempt to “place man in his context in the world” (125). The contextualisation of man, both spatially and temporally, has been, in other words, the fundamental component of the existentialist movement in the twentieth century. Existentialism has also been the voice of those who jointly felt the need to explore not only the relation between man and his freedom but also his autonomy (132). However, the fact remains that the impact of existentialism as a philosophical movement on us has now been less strongly felt than it used to be in the past. The existentialist movement of the 1950s has been superseded by the movements of structuralism and post-structuralism of the 1970s and 1980s. Strongly disagreeing with the view that Sartre and his existentialism can explain the transition from the 1950s to the 1980s, Warnock instead suggests that the transition in question can rather be explained only through the existentialism of Heidegger, because his focus upon destruction is commonly believed to have inspired Jacques Derrida to theorize his deconstructionism (143).

1.2. Martin Heidegger and His Existential Ontology

Heidegger's existentialism is built upon his own phenomenological investigation of the ontology of human existence. His existentialism is methodologically both phenomenological and ontological. Phenomenology has been briefly introduced above as the science of conscious experience. As for ontology, it can be concisely defined as the philosophical study of being in a systematic manner. The Greek philosopher Aristotle is commonly known as the first philosopher to have studied entities that have being as the subject of a scientific inquiry. In fact, ontology was not the term that Aristotle himself used in his Metaphysics to denote the science of being. Originally, it was First Philosophy that he used as the term to define the science “whose remit is being qua being and the things pertaining to that which is per se” (1998: 79).

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It appears essential to become familiarized with the notion of substance and its significance for the Aristotelian ontology before moving on to the discussion of Heidegger and his ontology. Substance forms the backbone of Aristotle’s study of being and the entities that have being which issues from his introduction of classifications earlier in his Categories, where he has catalogued entities according to ten criteria. The list runs as follows: Substance, or the what of something—i.e., man or horse; Quantity, or how large or small something is—i.e., three inches in width; Quality—what sort of thing something is—i.e., black or white; Relation—to what something is related or in what way something is related to something else—i.e., greater or smaller; Place—the where of something—i.e., at school or in the garden; Time—the when of something— i.e., yesterday or tomorrow; Posture or Position—the physical attitude in which something is located—i.e., sitting or standing; State or Condition—the circumstances of something—i.e., armed or unarmed; Action—the function of something—i.e., cuts or burns; and Affection—how something is affected by the action—i.e., is cut or is burnt (1962: 19).

According to Aristotle, substance makes up the principal cause of the being of all other categories. Without it, the others would not even have been conceivable. For this reason, Aristotle considers it of utmost significance for the philosopher to “gain possession of the principles and causes of substances” before all else (81). In this respect, one of the major contributions of Metaphysics has been both to define the substance of a thing as its essence and to demonstrate it philosophically. As will be seen in more detail later in this chapter, Aristotle’s failure to draw an ontological distinction between the being of human beings and the being of other entities will become the major point of criticism in Heidegger’s seminal, yet incomplete work, Being and Time.

In Being and Time, Heidegger (2008) expresses the objective of his treatise as consisting in an ontological attempt “to work out the question of the meaning of Being” (1). This question is commonly considered to have been first posed by the Greek philosophers Anaximander and Parmenides, and later by Aristotle. Since then, however, Heidegger argues, it has never ever been raised again as part of a serious philosophical inquiry, possibly because an understanding of it has been erroneously considered as readily available to all of us. It is especially to the Aristotelian way of handling beings

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according to their categorical properties that Heidegger’s main objection is directed. In view of this, Heidegger appears to be comparing the Pre-Socratic philosophers to those who came after. With this in mind, in his Being and Time, Heidegger aims at granting this long-forgotten question its due place back in the history of the western philosophy. Heidegger therefore intends his treatise to be an attempt to restate the question of Being after initiating “the process of destroying the ontological tradition” of the Western world (49).2

Early in his treatise, he draws attention to the distinction between his use of ‘being’ (Seiend) as a term to designate an entity, or a thing, and his use of ‘Being’ (Sein) as a term to describe the way entities are, or they exist. He particularly emphasizes that the Being of entities should not be confused with the entities themselves: “The Being of entities ‘is’ not itself an entity” (26). In other words, the distinction between the two terms, namely ontological and ontical, is stressed right at the beginning of his treatise: while ontological is used as an adjective to describe anything connected with the Being of entities, ontical is rather used in connection with the beings/entities themselves. He further comments upon the difference between the two by arguing that the prospects of understanding something which is ontically closest to us are, in fact, ontologically farthest from us (69).

He also warns against taking entities as the starting point of the ontological endeavour to understand Being, since he rules out the possibility that Being can ever “be ‘explained’ in terms of entities” (241). This is also the point about which Heidegger has raised his criticism against the Greek philosophers who, he believes, took the ontological study of human existence as something equal to the categorical study of non-human entities. Heidegger instead proposes that the entity which can alone pose the question about the meaning of Being, and which can alone understand Being itself, namely the human being, should be the starting point of any existential-ontological analysis. He makes it clear early on that rather than non-human entities “we are ourselves the entities to be analysed” (67). Hence, he introduces Dasein as a technical

2 Spanos compares the Heideggerian project of destroying the traditional metaphysics of the Western

world to the function of postmodern literature: “Postmodern literature … makes the ‘medium’ itself the ‘message’ in the sense that its function is to perform a Heideggerian ‘de-struction’ of the traditional metaphysical frame of reference, that is, to accomplish the phenomenological reduction of the spatial perspective by formal violence” (1976: 475).

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term in order to distinguish the human existence from the existence of non-human entities.

Heidegger postulates that there are two types of non-human entities. The first type of them covers those which are available out there by nature: whose existence does not depend on human beings, such as trees, rivers, water, etc. He uses the term ‘present-at-hand’—or, ‘vorhanden’ in German—to denote them. The second type refers to the general category of equipment, or utensils, which owe their existence to human beings, or which are made by men to serve a particular purpose, such as desks, pencils, cars, etc. They are termed ‘ready-to-hand’—or, ‘zuhanden’ in German.

Heidegger draws attention to the essential distinction that he has drawn earlier in his treatise between the following three terms: being as an entity, the Being in general, and the Being of Dasein. According to Heidegger, Dasein is distinguished from other entities in terms of its relationship to its own Being. What characterizes the Being of Dasein is that Dasein is concerned with its Being, and also it has an understanding of its Being. Dasein is concerned with its Being because “Being is an issue for it”; and similarly, Dasein can understand Being, because it “is ontological” (32). To put it in another way, Heidegger equates Being in general with the Being of Dasein in particular. As Brock suggests in his introductory notes on Being and Time, Dasein is distinguished from other entities, both ready-to-hand and present-at-hand, as the only being whose existence is exclusively its own (29). As has been pointed out above, Heidegger’s term for this is mineness (jemeiningkeit): “Dasein is an entity which in each case I myself am” (78). The implication of this is that the whole responsibility of my existence is wholly my own. Additionally, Heidegger attributes the concept of existence/existing solely to Dasein: “The ‘essence’ of Dasein lies in its existence” (67). Brock believes that this allows him to designate the defining characteristics of Dasein as existentiale/existentialia, while he uses the Aristotelian concept of categories, or existentia to refer to the characteristics of other entities, both present-at-hand and ready-to-hand (32). For example, Being-in is an existentiale which exclusively belongs to Dasein as one of its defining characteristics; however, in terms of the things which are either present-at-hand or ready-to-hand, Being-in is converted into an existentia, or the category of being inside something else (Heidegger, 82).

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Heidegger further suggests that temporality holds the key to his ontological inquiry into the meaning of Being in general as well as to the meaning of the Being of Dasein in particular. He considers time as the phenomenon in which “the central problematic of all ontology is rooted” (40). He then expresses his intention to approach Dasein from the perspective of temporality: “The question of the meaning of Being must be carried through by explicating Dasein beforehand in its temporality” (42). Heidegger’s major criticism of the ordinary exposition of time is that time has been traditionally interpreted as a sequence of nows—i.e., as being based in the present. As will be discussed in more detail below, he rather proposes that temporality is primarily based in the future.

Before moving on to further details, it should be noted at this point that Heidegger structures his treatise around two parts, although the second part never appears. Similarly, he separates the first part into three divisions, although the third division never comes out. He discusses temporality in Division Two of Part One. Although Division One is titled “Preparatory Fundamental Analysis of Dasein,” it is rather a chapter on the study of Dasein’s spatiality. What Heidegger does in Division Two is just a reworking of some of the same concepts that he has introduced in Division One. For instance, he approaches the notion of everydayness from a spatial perspective while he discusses Dasein’s existential state of being in the world in Division One; and he does the same thing in Division Two from a temporal perspective as well. Therefore, Division One can and should be considered as a study of “Dasein’s existential spatiality,” while Division Two is devoted to the study of its temporal dimension (83). Heidegger analyses neither time nor space as separate entities; the objective of his analysis is to explain the meaning of occupying a place both in the world and in time in a way which is unique to human beings.

1.2.1. Division One: Dasein’s Spatiality as Being-in-the-world

Division One is largely devoted to the discussion of Dasein’s basic state of existence in the world. Heidegger calls it Being-in-the-world. The human existence owes its definition to the fact that the world provides necessary space for the actualization of its possibility to be. Being-in-the-world is a basic ontological

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phenomenon which cannot be broken into further pieces; on the contrary, it must be thought of as a whole: “Being-in-the-world is a structure which is primordially and constantly whole” (225).

Heidegger’s conception of Dasein’s spatiality is closely linked with his ontological investigation of the relationship of Dasein with the entities, existing as either present-at-hand or ready-to-hand in the world. One of the fundamental ontological constituents of Being-in-the-world therefore consists in the fact that human beings are surrounded by various kinds of entities which they use for various purposes. However, Heidegger calls attention to the ontological distinction of the Being-in-the-world of Dasein from the Being-in-the-Being-in-the-world of other entities:

Dasein is essentially not a Being-present-at-hand; and its “Spatiality” cannot signify anything like occurrence at a position in ‘world-space’, nor can it signify Being-ready-to-hand at some place. Both of these are kinds of Being which belong to entities encountered within-the-world. Dasein, however, is ‘in’ the world in the sense that it deals with entities encountered within-the-world, and does so concernfully and with familiarity. (138)

The spatiality which existentially belongs to man cannot be thought of separately from Being-in-the-world. Heidegger analyses the spatial ontology of Dasein in terms of its closeness to whatever exists around it. Dasein understands its spatial ontology through whatever is near it.

As Being-in-the-world, Dasein is also surrounded by others. The implication of this is that sharing emerges as an essential constituent of human existence, because each individual human being is bound to share the one and the same world with others. In this respect, Heidegger chooses Being-with as a term to designate the existential characteristic of Dasein’s Being as Being-in-the-world. He maintains that even being alone is a mode of being with others, albeit in its deficient mode. The possibility of an escape from the social dimension of human existence is not available. To illustrate this point further, Heidegger differentiates between concern and solicitude: whereas the term “concern” is used to define the relationship of Dasein with tools and equipment, the relationship of Dasein with other Daseins is defined with the term “solicitude” (157). Heidegger believes that in the mode of being with others, solicitude operates

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ubiquitously as well as unexceptionally, though deficiently: “Being for, against, or without one another, passing one another by, not ‘mattering’ to one another—these are possible ways of solicitude” (158).

In his examination of the ways in which the Being of Dasein manifests itself, Heidegger places the utmost emphasis upon the concept of what he calls state-of-mind (Befindlichkeit). Brock clarifies it as “the [specific] way in which a Dasein is ‘placed’ in life and in the world” (47). The states-of-mind of Dasein are most easily visible in the moods. To put it in simpler terms, the easiest way to know about others is to examine their moods. Similarly, it is our moods which will disclose us in the most direct way. In this respect, Heidegger believes that moods have the ontological priority over “all cognition and volition” (175). He afterwards analyses one special mood, namely fear, to contrast it with anxiety later in his treatise and to prepare the reader for the examination of the crucial notion of care. In his analysis of the phenomenon of fear, Heidegger briefly suggests that being human is synonymous with being fearful by postulating that fear and fearing are essential to the characterization of the Being of Dasein: “Dasein as Being-in-the-world is ‘fearful’” (182).

One other way in which the Being of Dasein becomes manifest is called understanding (Verstehen). Heidegger treats it as a fundamental constituent of the Being of Dasein as Being-in-the-world. In Heidegger’s ontological analysis, understanding mainly implies awareness of a future possibility for the sake of which Dasein exists. In other words, Dasein always understands itself as a possibility—something which makes it a future-oriented phenomenon. In this sense, understanding emerges as something tantamount to projecting: “The understanding has in itself the existential structure which we call ‘projection’” (184). In understanding, Dasein gains the capability of assessing the chances of whether it can make a future possibility come true or not. The assessment may turn out to be incorrect from time to time, and consequently it may lead Dasein to miss some of its potentialities; or a correct calculation may award Dasein with the ability to see that they are coming true. Moreover, as an existentiale, understanding may be authentic or inauthentic, depending on the self—the public or the individual—out of which it arises.

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